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NEWS
Rei (Tanaka Toshihiko, 2024).
- Tanaka Toshihiko’s Rei (2024)—the director’s debut feature, which he also produced and edited, and in which he acts—has won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam.
- Mark Gustafson, acclaimed animator and co-director of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), has died at the age of 64. Del Toro calls him “a pillar of stop-motion animation—a true artist.”
- In response to an open letter signed by more than 200 film workers (which has since been taken offline) the Berlin International Film Festival confirmed that it has invited two far-right German politicians to the opening ceremony but avers it stands “against right-wing extremism.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Via Dolorosa (Oraib Toukan, 2021).
- The second part of Le Cinéma Club's two-week spotlight on Oraib Toukan features her film Via Dolorosa (2021), now streamable on the platform. The short is made from archival material shot between 1967 and 1969 by the Palestinian photographer and cinematographer Hani Jawharieh, repurposed and accompanied by commentary from scholar Nadia Yaqub. In an accompanying interview republished by Le Cinéma Club, the artist says that her aim is to understand what she calls “cruel images,” which “is not a category so much as a story about a degraded subject in an image getting further degraded with use, reuse, and circulation.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Brick and Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965).
- “Now, this is it: look at this country, look at its people, and you will see beauty, ugliness, excitement, boredom, despair, hope—the entire range of humanity that exists in any other place.” “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979,” the largest ever retrospective of Iranian film, recently concluded its run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. René Baharmast spoke to series curator Ehsan Khoshbakht for Filmmaker.
- “Bushman is an astute examination of place, immigration, racism, blinkered liberals, and the inevitability of outrageous state-sanctioned violence in that convulsive epoch.” In 4Columns, Melissa Anderson places David Schickele’s docufiction work within the context of other films shot during the “near daily upheavals” of 1968, a period when “brutal fact collided with fiction.”
- “Monumental history being suspect, most contemporary directors would attempt a revisionist approach or present a more ‘human’ portrait of the emperor, likely by delving into his psychology. Scott instead gives us something far weirder: Napoleon as freak.” For Sabzian, Florian Deroo analyzes Ridley Scott’s complicated treatment of the topic of history, and historical (in)accuracy, in Napoleon (2023).
- “Some filmmakers, working without commercial constraints, demonstrate great artistic originality; others make, in effect, calling cards, proving their mastery of the codes of commercial cinema, albeit on a scant budget.” Sundance’s “sweet spot” lies in the intersection of these two things, argues Richard Brody in The New Yorker, assessing the festival’s 2024 edition. He picks out new films by Nathan Silver and Shiori Itō as standouts from a selection that was “a little slighter in innovation than last year’s crop.”
- “Ferrari is death-haunted, even for a Mann film, even for a film set in Italy.” A. S. Hamrah writes about men, cars, death, and loss, covering Michael Mann’s Ferrari (2023) for the New York Review of Books. (Bonus: Hamrah spoke about this piece, and film criticism more generally, in an interview conducted for the same publication by Willa Glickman.)
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Maya Deren's Sink (Barbara Hammer, 2011).
- New York, ongoing through February 13: Programmed by Andrea Torres and Emily Greenberg, Film Forum’s “Sapph-O-Rama” is a 30-film series exploring the “eccentric, enduring, and genre-encompassing history of the Lesbian image in cinema,” expanded from a series first presented at the same venue in 2000. One highlight is “Infinite Strength,” a shorts program looking at Maya Deren’s influence on Barbara Hammer.
- London, ongoing through March 15: “All I need is a little bit of everything,” a new exhibition by Douglas Gordon, is on view at Gagosian. It includes various text works; a new film, 2023EastWestGirlsBoys (2023), which reflects on the artist’s memories of London’s Soho neighborhood; plus the installation piece Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now... (1999–), which is displayed on more than a hundred screens, ranging from CRT monitors to flatscreens to iPads.
- New York, February 9 through 26: “Struggle of Memory: Forgetting Haiti, Remembering Ayiti” is a series curated by Yasmina Price for Anthology Film Archives that explores Haiti’s cinematic history through selections created, variously, by “Haitians, diasporic or hyphenated Haitians, and non-Haitians.” Some films, such as Maya Deren, Teiji Ito, and Cherel Winett Ito’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1954/81) show how outsiders have interpreted the island, whereas others, like Ouvertures (2019), made by Louis Henderson and Olivier Marboeuf with the Haitian theater group The Living and the Dead Ensemble, offer more of an insider’s perspective.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924).
- Every October, Damfinos from around the world descend on Muskegon, Michigan, for the International Buster Keaton Society Convention. Kat Sachs reports back from last year’s edition with tales of slapstick, peril, and technical difficulties.
- The myth of the self-made muscle man crumbles: Patrick Holzapfel visits Arnold Schwarzenegger’s boyhood home museum to better understand the Austrian exemplar of the American Dream.
- Robert Barry considers the place of music in Aki Kaurismäki’s oeuvre, from death-by-radio in Hamlet Goes Business (1987) to karaoke-bar romance in Fallen Leaves (2023).
- Choose your own adventure through repositories of Black trans experience: Matt Turner speaks with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley about her work in animation and video games.
EXTRAS
The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023).
- Using Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023) as a case study—a film that cinematographer Eigil Bryld is quoted as saying was intended to “look like it was a movie found in the cans in someone’s garage”—a fascinating piece in Filmmaker by Devan Scott explains how filmmakers emulate “the film look” using all-digital equipment.
- “It’s a niche business, and we are often releasing films that are only known to a niche portion of that niche.” Jim Hemphill surveys the world of boutique Blu-ray and DVD for IndieWire, looking into the tireless detective work that labels like Vinegar Syndrome, Radiance, and Fun City Editions are doing, despite the difficult underlying economic conditions, to bring under-seen titles back into the spotlight.